Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, 1778, it's the first statewide legislative referendum in the United States

which took place in Massachusetts.

I want to give you listeners a little bit of context for why we're doing this first

right off the bat as you may know in the run-up to the midterm election which is

just a few weeks away we are going to do a number of episodes that are

historical yes but maybe also give us some perspective or something to think about as we watch this year's election play out so we're going to do a full week on our favorite midterm stories and a full week on our favorite stories about polling and this folks is the first episode of

Referendums Week which we really like to lead with the most exciting salacious stuff

at first and I just know like people are running to their radios to turn up the volume when they hear

referendums week a whole week about referendums and ballot initiatives.

But for real we are excited to do this in no small part because look the selection has focused us on how

broken our democracy can feel and it is maybe one way to start unbreaking it is

through these moments of direct democracy, these

referendums, these ballot initiatives, when the people vote directly on things as

opposed to voting for representatives who then vote on things. So that's a lot of

table setting I know.

Let me introduce our guest who's

going to sit at this table for these next two episodes.

Joshua Graham Lynn, CEO of the group,

represent us who are on anti-corruption, pro-democracy, nonpartisan grassroots

organization. They've worked on a bunch of referendums and initiatives. They know how this stuff works.

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